Enigma Machines Fetch High Prices at Auctions

May 16, 2013

Antiques

By EVE M. KAHN

Late in World War II, fleeing German soldiers tried to destroy the equipment they used for transmitting messages in their Enigma code. Hundreds of salvageable machines, however, were left behind, and the technology, with alphabet keyboards and hidden rotors, still fascinates the public.

“It’s got spying, it’s got mystery, it’s got great stories behind it,” Kenneth Rendell, the founder of the Museum of World War II, in Natick, Mass., said in a phone interview. He has nine Enigma machines on view. (Another is on loan at the New-York Historical Society through May 27.)

The devices and related material now routinely bring five-figure prices at auction. On March 12 a canvas sheath for an Enigma instruction book, marked with a yellowish cross, perhaps to disguise it as a first-aid guide, sold for $13,800 at James D. Julia Auctioneers in Fairfield, Me.

On April 24 an Enigma machine in a wooden box sold for $76,000 at Christie’s in London. On May 9 a rusty model missing the letters O and Z brought around $22,000 at Hermann Historica auction house in Munich. On May 25 Auction Team Breker in Cologne, Germany, will offer an Enigma that a Danish officer preserved. (The high estimate is $32,500.)

Many countries ban sales of Nazi memorabilia, but the Enigma is exempt.

“It’s so apolitical in itself,” David Hamer, an executive committee member at the National Cryptologic Museum at Fort Meade in Maryland, who helps sell Enigmas, said in a phone interview.

Oddities in the field keep turning up. At the Bloomfield Science Museum in Jerusalem, an Enigma has a keyboard converted to Hebrew. The Bletchley Park National Codes Center, at the estate near London where British forces deciphered enemy messages, is showing a ruined machine fished out of a river in Poland. (It had recently appeared on eBay.)

The code center, part of the setting for a new television series, “The Bletchley Circle,” is restoring its 1940s huts and digitizing a voluminous archive.

“We found boxes of papers we didn’t know we had,” Victoria Worpole, the center’s director of education and collections, said in a phone interview.

David Kahn, a historian in Manhattan who has written about Enigmas for decades, is donating his library to the National Cryptologic Museum.

He keeps buying more books, but resists the temptation to own an actual Enigma.

In 1814, at 32, he spent months in debtors’ prison. A sheriff’s team seized the contents of his house in New Brunswick, N.J. His children and his pregnant wife, Margaret, were allowed to keep only some clothes.

Now, Williams’s first retrospective is at the Monmouth County Historical Association in Freehold, N.J. “Let me introduce you to his long-suffering wife, Margaret,” Bernadette M. Rogoff, the museum curator there, said while giving a preview of the exhibition, “Micah Williams: Portrait Artist.”

A three-rotor Enigma machine in a wooden case that carries its serial number.

Enigma Museum

The show, which opens on Sunday, starts with Margaret’s image at the gallery entryway. She posed wearing no jewelry, and with her eyebrows skeptically raised.

Ms. Rogoff has gathered a quarter of Williams’s 272 pastels and oils depicting prosperous New Yorkers and New Jerseyans. She is still trying to determine how he reinvented himself as an itinerant portraitist soon after he was released from prison. (Before that he had shuttered a failing silversmith workshop.)

Family correspondence mentions problems “caused by brandy.” Yet he could finish a painting in a day, capturing charisma and minute clothing details in generations of venerable families, mostly from New Jersey, like the Schencks and Van Maters. His sitters carry evocative props: peaches symbolize families’ thriving orchards, and jewelry containing human hair suggests recent bereavement.

In 1835 a tornado struck New Brunswick, N.J., and is believed to have destroyed Williams’s studio. He died two years later, at 55.

His portraits keep emerging on the market with five-figure prices, at auction houses including Skinner in Boston and Pook & Pook in Downingtown, Pa. The exhibition and catalog may unearth more.

“I call it ‘shaking the trees,’ ” Ms. Rogoff said.

OUTSIDER ART

The major auction houses typically turn down outsider art, since its prices fall below their mid-four-figure minimums. Material Culture, a year-old auction house in Philadelphia, is helping fill the gap with a May 26 sale focused partly on outsider art.

Paintings and sculptures by celebrated artists like Howard Finster are combined with unsigned carnival ads for snake charmers and human cannonballs, and tribal and Asian antiques including Tibetan lama vests (with estimates for each from a few hundred dollars to five figures).

The eclectic mix contains “many pieces of substantial merit and deep tradition,” George Jevremovic, Material Culture’s founder, said in a phone interview.

He has one established competitor: Slotin Folk Art in Buford, Ga., has held outsider art sales for 17 years. The owner, Steve Slotin, said diplomatically in a phone interview that he was flattered by the new Philadelphia venture.

GETTING HIS DUE

The Viennese designer Koloman Moser has long been in the shadow of his flashier colleague Josef Hoffmann. From 1903 to 1907, Moser teamed up with Hoffmann at the Wiener Werkstätte collaborative, without recording his own achievements much.

“Moser never wrote anything,” except for one autobiographical essay, Christian Witt-Dörring, the curator of a Moser retrospective that opens on Thursday at the Neue Galerie in Manhattan, said in a phone interview.

Moser was self-made; his father was a school caretaker, and the family apartment was shabby. He learned as a teenager to cater to patrons’ tastes for clean forms and semiprecious stones. (A June 13 design auction at Christie’s in New York has a Moser silver box studded with malachite, estimated at $50,000 to $70,000.)

In 1905 Moser married the brewery heiress Editha Mautner von Markhof. When his Wiener Werkstätte colleagues asked her for money behind his back, he quit the group. He devoted himself to painting bouquets, landscapes and portraits until his death in 1918, at 50. (On Thursday Sotheby’s in London will offer a Moser painting of flowers and fence posts, estimated at $90,000 to $120,000.)

The Neue Galerie team has found archival evidence to newly attribute some major works to Moser, including a black oak cabinet inlaid with a scene of fish nibbling seaweed that belongs to the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest.